


The Monster We Forgot

by Charlemagne1



Category: Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Character Study, Evil Ernest AU, Family Drama, Gen, You can't ignore Ernest Forever Victor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-21
Updated: 2021-01-21
Packaged: 2021-03-12 17:14:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,359
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28888941
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Charlemagne1/pseuds/Charlemagne1
Summary: Walton delivers the news of Victor’s death to Ernest and quickly realizes the Frankenstein middle child had more to do with his family’s tragedy than previously thought.Watch me destroy everything Ask of the Lesser did to build up Ernest's character
Comments: 13
Kudos: 8





	The Monster We Forgot

My first impression of Ernest Frankenstein was that he was unwell. Not because of the cane that trembled beneath his boney fingers or the bags under his eyes that hinted at a long-term ailment, but from the way he cast quick, feverish glances to the shadows at the far end of the living room while motioning me to have a seat in an overturned chair.

“I appreciate you coming all this way, Captain. Have a seat while I fetch us some refreshments.” Ernest again nodded to the toppled chair and hobbled into the shadows where the weak slants of sunlight from the broken window couldn’t reach. I heard the steady clunk of his cane against the wooden floor as I set the chair upright and attempted to get comfortable on the warped wood. It was slick with black mold. The table in front of me had three legs and a bowed-in top. 

“You have my condolences, Monsieur. I see the revolutionaries have found your house first,” I called into the darkness. 

“Nonsense. The peasants know to keep their distance. As do the staff. Tea?” Ernest stepped into the light with his free hand expertly carrying a tray of china. He set a pot on the three-legged table and poured us each a cup. “When I was a boy, we had a servant that taught me all sorts of housekeeping tricks! Honestly, I considered Justine more of a mother than my own flesh and blood!”

The warm liquid loosened the tightness in my throat as Ernest settled into the wicker chair across from me. 

“Now, you promised me news of Victor’s whereabouts, Captain?”

"That I did."

I pulled the hastily scribbled notes from my pocket that contained Victor’s narrative and final words to the living. My thumb stroked the yellowed paper as I ran through my rehearsed speech a final time.

“I found your brother half-frozen on the ice during my expedition to the North Pole. The sailors and I did all we could, but he was just too weak, Monsieur.”

“Call me Ernest,” the man croaked. His cup rattled against the saucer as he set it down. “So Victor, my brother, has departed from this earth? Permanently?”

“I’m afraid so.”

Ernest’s loose clothes shifted as he slumped his skeletal shoulders. He looked like a lost child more than a twenty-year-old man. I offered him Victor’s notes, their truth conflicting with the other account in my head that had seeped into my heart. I had to know which one was true. “But before his death, he gave an account of his life! I feel you should have it.”

“Did Victor mention me much in this narrative?” Ernest took the notes from my hands. His yellowed fingernails were starting to curl at the tips. 

“No,” I admitted, intently focusing on my tea. 

“Typical.” Ernest sniffed. “I was his junior by seven years. When he was running, I was learning to crawl. I tried to catch up, but Victor was too far ahead. Too distracted by that obnoxious poet wannabe and street girl his own age to notice me trailing behind!” Ernest closed his eyes for a moment. When they opened, he was smiling.

“My apologies, Captain. I doubt you care to listen to my rambles! Thank you for bringing me this news. I will show you the door—”

“That isn’t necessary,” I said, desperate to remain in the dingy home and learn the secrets it contained. “I only knew Victor for a short time, but his story is not one that is easily forgotten. Please, tell me more about your family.” I raised my cup. “At least until I've finished my tea.”

Ernest’s mouth had fallen open at my request. His fingers drummed against his cane.

“It’s been a long time since anyone wanted to listen to me,” he said quietly. “Very well, I shall humor your request. But be warned that my family paled in comparison to Victor’s genius. Hell, that bitch Mother plucked from the streets wasn’t family at all! Mother only adopted Elizabeth because she wanted a girl. I was a disappointment in that regard, too. They treated Elizabeth as an equal, but I remember the mud-stained rags they brought her home in. I made sure she never forgot her place among our high standing family of magistrates and officials!”

A window broke in the distance as a crowd cheered. The peasants spurred by France’s revolution didn’t place much stock in town officials anymore. 

“What does any of it matter now, though? They are all dead.” Ernest’s body shook as a fit of coughing seized him. His tears glowed in the weak light as I shuffled in the small chair. 

“Justine was the only one who ever looked past my illness. Where mother and father saw weakness, she found potential. That was enough for me. I would have lived a good life, Walton, if Justine would have continued to love me as Mother should have. But she found a new favorite after William was born,” Ernest paused to sip his tea. “When mother passed, everyone fondled over William while Victor left for university! He didn’t even say goodbye, or write for that matter! Did I mean that little to him?”

“Victor adored your mother,” I said, willing him to understand. “The first pages of his account consisted solely of her and your father’s past. Losing her devastated him.”

“But he still had me!” Fresh hurt seeped from Ernest’s voice. “Maybe I couldn’t read all of his big alchemy books or help with his experiments, but I loved watching him study by candlelight from afar! I so desperately wanted to follow him beyond Geneva’s walls and see all the fascinating things smart guys like him did! I wrote to him every night asking what the weather was like in Ingolstadt. What he ate that day. I even stole paper from Father’s desk with the hope that my extra check-in would be the letter that would inspire Victor to respond!"

Even now, childish admiration shone in Ernest’s eyes, though it had eroded from the grief present too. 

“But he never wrote back. He didn’t notice me like before. I was alone with Justine and the rest constantly obsessing over that sobbing toddler! Laughing when he tagged me and teased that I couldn’t limp fast enough to catch him. Victor never did that. I had to get him back! I needed them back, too.” A cloud passed over the sun, dimming the light to hide Ernest’s face. “Then the incident happened. I found William strangled on the grass, and Justine, who had spent the night in the barn we’d always hike to and stargaze together, had a portrait of mother that William had stolen earlier and was convicted and executed for her crime.” Ernest paused, his milky eyes fixed on me.

“Go on,” I said. “It helps to be open and discuss these things.”

Ernest refilled my empty cup. “You don’t seem surprised?”

“I’ve read Victor’s account.”

“Victor,” Ernest’s eyes watered as he took little sips from his cup. “I wanted him home so badly! And he came. After years of studying abroad, William’s funeral was the catalyst for Victor's return. As I suspected, he was crippled with grief, but I assumed Victor’s refusal to discuss his studies with me would pass with time. I vowed to show him that I wasn’t a little kid anymore! I made him tea to ease his nerves and crouched outside his door each night, ready to rush in and comfort him when he awoke screaming from nightmares. No one else did that!" Ernest banged his cane against the floor.

"Then he left again! He ran off to England of all places with Henry! Wasn’t sharing classes enough for those two?” Ernest begged, asking for an answer I couldn’t give.  
Ernest stood and walked over to the broken window, his split fingernails running along the spiky leaves of a potted fern I had never seen before. I assumed it was native to this part of the land.

“Henry and Victor were inseparable,” Ernest said, pinching the tip of a leaf that oozed white liquid. “As I watched their carriage disappear over the hill, I knew Victor would never consider me his equal—not while Henry lived. I’ll admit, to his credit Henry was a fine letter writer. He kept us informed on their travels and separation when Victor left to pursue his private business. When fishermen found Henry's corpse on the coast and Victor was convicted, I was shocked as anyone! But I knew Victor would convince them of his innocence, like the time he persuaded mother to buy lead for his alchemy experiments. He was always so smart, so good with words!”

Victor’s account told a different story. Of how he had been seized with a maddening grief that left him inconsolable in his cell for months while outside investigators cleared his name. There had been no persuading on his part. Ernest seemed either in denial or unaware of his brother’s then-crippled mental state.

“Sure enough," Ernest continued, "Victor was proven innocent and he returned home to be wed to Elizabeth. Father was concerned with how little Victor ate and the way he stared at his bedroom wall for hours on end, but I knew he would spring back to his former self soon enough! And I would be there to take Henry’s place when that day arrived. Father foolishly attributed Victor’s misery to his impending marriage and voiced his concerns one night at the dinner table.” 

Ernest waved his hand toward a dark doorframe. My eyes had grown accustomed to the darkness and I spied a splintered dinner table shoved against the back wall beside a cold fireplace. Poking through the ashes were the hardened remains of a half-melted frame large enough to have been a family portrait. 

“Victor denied father’s offer to abandon the plans for his upcoming marriage. He insisted that his love for Elizabeth was true and his only chance at happiness! It was truly a tragedy when she was murdered on their wedding night and Father passed away from a broken heart. I guess Victor and I weren’t enough to tether his old bones to life any longer. I still don’t see what they ever saw in that walking charity-case!”

Rage stirred within me for the daemon that had committed such atrocities! I forced my breathing to slow, not wanting to startle the young Frankenstein whose words tumbled from his cracked lips with growing intensity. How long had he bottled this up? Ernest seemed desperate to be heard. 

“After that, it was just me and Victor.” Ernest settled back in his chair, rubbing his pale hands together. “We were all each other had left. I planned to fill the shoes of those rotting in the ground. I would make Victor laugh like William did, bring a smile to his chapped lips as only Elizabeth could, and point out nature’s beauty on evening strolls the way Henry used to. It was going to be perfect! But…”

“But that didn’t happen, did it?”

“No,” Ernest blotted his eyes with a stained handkerchief. “Victor blamed our family’s tragedy on some imagined monster! He even went to a city magistrate to request sending soldiers over the alps to catch the alleged fiend! When he stood at the podium, leaning on me for support while rambling his madness, I realized how thin Victor had become. How the spark of life within him I had circled like an eager moth for years had dimmed. I had at last caught up to my brother, and what I found was…a disappointment.”

Ernest looked past me at a scene I could not see. “I tried coxing his old self back out, but he was too obsessed with revenge against his ‘monster’ to register my kind gestures. His attention was fixated on a force these hands couldn’t rip away! One day I came in with his morning tea, and he was gone. He left me with only my broken rose-tinted lenses and a reality that never was.”

“I’m sorry, Ernest.”

“But he came back, at least," Ernest smiled, stroking the notes. "Victor always comes back to me. Discussing him with another human has breathed new life into his legacy, wouldn't you agree?" Ernest leaned forward on his cane. "This is the most alive my Victor can be now. Surely you—and by extension him—won’t walk out and leave me again?"

There was power behind his plea. "What are you saying?" I raised an eyebrow. 

Ernest rested his cane against the chair and crossed his fingers. “I have told you quite enough, Walton. May I ask you a question, now?”

“You may.”

Ernest cocked his head at an unnatural angle. “What are you?”

Silence lingered between us.

“You introduced yourself as a Mr. Captain Walton, but that French accent is fooling no one. I am smarter than they gave me credit for.” Ernest’s chuckle broke into a cough as he clutched his mouth. Red stained his hand when he pulled it away. “The poison in Hebenon is strong enough to kill an entire staff of maids, though taking small doses here and there can build up a tolerance. Not immunity, but it’s enough to outlast the person in the other chair."

My teacup fell to the floor and shattered.

"The others were dead within the first few sentences of my sob story, yet you sit unmoved," Ernest frowned. "Are you an angel come to judge my case? A demon ordered to drag me down to hell?”

“I wanted to be a friend," I admitted. "Though, now I fear I am only a ripple from a stone you cast.” I stood and my knees trembled only slightly. The poison indeed had little effect on my galvanized flesh. I brushed my knotted hair aside to give Ernest a full view of my mismatched flesh and yellow eyes likely laced with busted blood vessels by now. “And Ernest, stones sink.”

Ernest clutched the notes I had snatched from Walton before making my escape out his ship’s window. “A monster!”

“The mirrors behind you,” I growled.

“Victor was telling the truth, then? He really did create life!” Ernest grinned as the blood flowed faster from the gaps in his rotted teeth. “I knew it! I knew my brother was a genius! Smart enough to do anything he put his mind to!” 

“Murderer!” I thundered and Ernest flinched. “I know what you did—though initially, I had hoped my suspicions were wrong. When you strangled your younger brother, Victor believed I was the culprit! At first I played along, thinking he would comply with my demands to create a mate if he believed me capable of murdering his loved ones. When he went back on that promise, I vowed to be with him on his wedding night and reveal my existence to Elizabeth with hopes she would have pity and convince her husband to keep his word. Then you killed Henry and Victor again blamed me and took my promise as a threat! How did you do it? He was in another country.”

“Father’s world was one of social standing and self-preservation,” Ernest twirled a matted lock between his split fingernails. The lack of emotion in his voice was worse than if he'd spoken with pride or even joy! 

“My weak bones were an embarrassment to him at the grand balls and social gatherings our family held in this house." Ernest kicked the battered table. "Father neither missed me nor noted my absence when I slipped away for several days to visit the last place Henry had written of. It was easy to lure him out with my smiling face and lies of Victor’s whereabouts. He never expected the danger, and the officials never thought a weakling like me capable of such violent actions. Honestly, Monsieur Monster, with gullibility like that someone would have offed’ him eventually! I merely hastened the inevitable while acting in Victor’s best interests.” 

Ernest ran his fingers down the bent middle of his cane. How easy it would have been to spring from behind and press that solid wood against the throat of an unsuspecting man waiting for who he thought was a friend. My fingers curled into fists. 

“You think yourself so clever, don’t you? But I saw you sneaking through the window on Victor’s wedding night while he searched the house for a nonexistent enemy. I tried to stop you, but the vines tripped me in the darkness, and Elizabeth's lungs had released their final scream by the time I reached the window. I spied you crouching behind the bed, easily hidden in the shadows. You couldn’t see me from your angle, but I saw you. When Victor burst into the room I pointed to your hiding spot, but he mistook my warning for gesturing gleefully to the corpse of his beloved and fired his weapon I barely dodged in time! I’m sure you know how he fainted from shock afterward. That was when you made your escape, right?”

“Of course.”

“But why?”

“Victor wouldn’t have understood that I was doing it for him,” Ernest said simply. He blotted the blood from his lips. “It was best to leave before he asked questions that would break his heart.”

“You are well aware that that’s not what I meant!” I roared. 

“Calm yourself,” Ernest shook his head. “You’re acting as though I am the villain? Having been born of my brother’s mind, you must surely be smarter than that! Would you have done differently in my place? If your life was sabotaged by illness before you even lived?” 

Ernest wiped his dripping nose. “What did I ever do to God to make Him curse me with this blight? I thought He was good and loved the little children?” Ernest sighed. “Why follow the rules set by one who broke them Himself? The Divine doomed me to a life of worthlessness, but I fought back! I do believe that I—and everyone—deserves to be loved. I may have been incapable of severe application, but I could love, and I wanted that affection reciprocated by my big brother who could do anything in the world!”

“If you truly loved him, you wouldn’t have struck down those Victor cared for!” I hissed. “It was his family that made his life worth living! By stripping them away from him, you stripped your brother of the will to live. Your selfish fantasies drove him to his death!”

“I did no such thing! I AM his family!" Ernest shouted with a force that sent me stepping away from the small man. "I could have made him happier than everyone else combined—if he’d only given me a chance!” Ernest kicked over his chair and beat it violently with his cane. The strength behind each blow surprised me. “I did everything I could think of, but he still never noticed me!” Ernest abandoned the chair and flipped through Victor’s narrative that contained so little of him. The tears dripping into the hollows of his cheeks mingled with the smeared blood. 

“At least he cared enough to pursue you. At least you meant SOMETHING to him! But now he’s gone along with my chances of ever proving myself! I’ve caught up and surpassed my brother, but he’s not there when I glance back. What’s the point of even walking anymore?”

A low noise escaped Ernest’s throat. At first, I thought it was a cry, but as it raised in pitch and intensity, I realized he was laughing—or attempting to mimic what humans call laughter. The noise in his throat was hollow, all humanity having been carved out long ago. It shook the tea and made my mismatched bones rattle in fear of hinted evils that put my own dark birth to shame. My hand lurched forward to stifle that awful howling, and Ernest lay limp at my feet. His sightless eyes were empty. Silence settled over the broken furniture and slashed wallpaper. As unwelcoming to me as it had always been toward him.

**Author's Note:**

> Me in 2020: tee-hee, Ernest is sad boi who goes on Lovecraftian adventures!  
> 2021: Ernest is a mass murderer with a body count—take it or leave it! 
> 
> I’ll admit this was a “what-if Ernest was evil” infodump more so than a traditional story. Rest assured future fics will be better paced and not so…intense. This was a little too dark even for me (haha)!  
> Here's a little animatic I did that inspired this fic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYkY4pEQPj4  
> **Also, I did slightly change the timeline so Ernest was alive when Elizabeth was adopted by the Frankensteins. Him remembering her being brought home in rags and thinking himself better was too good to not include!


End file.
